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With fans clutching their ticket dollars ever more tightly, touring artists have resorted to bringing the people what they want. Exactly what they want. In order.
They’re hitting the road, playing their most beloved albums from start to finish, track by beloved track.
Bruce Springsteen, Public Enemy and Van Morrison are just a few of the acts who’ve recently embraced the idea – one that’s penetrated indie rock enclaves and vast swaths of the boomerverse with a quickness that rivals swine flu. Now, with the likes of Devo, Steely Dan and the Pixies playing their classics onstage this month, buying a concert ticket feels more like pressing “play.”
But can we please press “stop”?
This trend feels like a cruel perversion of music’s real-time magic. Live music might be the last bastion of unpredictability in today’s hypercurated mediascape: a fleeting opportunity to experience something unfiltered, spontaneous and really real. Instead, we’re paying to see our greatest living, breathing, sweating, bleeding rock stars behave like iPods. And with no “shuffle” function!
Fans of a certain generation are still mourning the death of the album format, giving these shows a certain Irish wake-like quality. But they didn’t start out that way. Brian Wilson and Cheap Trick are often credited as being among the first acts to take their classic albums to the stage. But the idea came into full bloom at All Tomorrow’s Parties, a British music festival. In 2005, ATP invited the Stooges, Belle & Sebastian, Gang of Four and others to revisit their most beloved track lists.
As the artist intended?
“To hear the album the way the artist intended you to hear it, in a live setting – I thought it was really interesting,” ATP founder Barry Hogan says. “But in a way, it’s turned into a bit of an epidemic.”
Scores of artists have taken their best albums to the stage. Slayer has been performing its speed-metal magna carta “Reign in Blood” overseas this fall, while Todd Rundgren was recently in Rockville, Md., to present his 1973 prog-rock odyssey, “A Wizard, A True Star.” With album tours, the original recording is consecrated as sacred text.
But that hasn’t stopped less-than-iconic albums from enjoying the full concert reboot. The approach has been adopted by Liz Phair, Judas Priest, Jay-Z, the Meat Puppets, Lou Reed, Cat Power, the Lemonheads, Spiritualized, They Might Be Giants, the Go-Gos and countless others.
“I think it’s successful and you’ll probably see more acts trying to do it,” says Gary Bongiovanni, editor in chief of Pollstar, a trade publication that tracks the concert industry. “We’re in a different economic environment right now. Most fans only go to one or two shows a year. So if you offer them the unique experience to relive one of the classic albums they used to wear out on their turntable, that’s appealing.”
But the most powerful concert experiences hinge on a heightened sense of anticipation – a feeling of suspense that borders on magic.
We pine for the guitarist to pull the trigger on the opening jingle-jangles of our favorite song. We allow a band to whisk us off into the great, ecstatic unknown.
When an artist plays an album in order, all of that magic goes poof. We know what’s coming before we hear Track 1.
